Revenge Week: Dirty Blood's Dangerous Payback

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

As a society Korea has been slow to change despite its economic growth. At times it can seem like a gigantic, perpetually simmering pot of discontent that seems dangerously close to boiling over. One aspect of Korean society that is often brushed under the carpet is repressed sexuality and while it isn’t something you will encounter much in TV dramas, music and the news, the Korean film industry, of late, has been vocal in its depiction of the widespread abuse that rages through the country. Truth be told, it is often used opportunistically and many of the works in question tread a very fine line.

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Revenge Week: Trailers of Revenge! Day 3

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013). This daily series comes courtesy of Tom Giammarco, the author of the Seen in Jeonju website, surely one of the best resources for information on classic Korean cinema on the web. Enjoy!

It is day three of Modern Korean Cinema's REVENGE WEEK and I continue looking back at forgotten movies of past decades where vengence plays a major role. Today's film is the awkwardly titled Report of the Daughter-in-Law's Rice Flower as it is called on the KMDb but also known as Report of Cowwheat (Daum). It is a film from 1989 directed by Ryu Jae-moo and starring Na Yeong-hee. In this film, Soon-yi has tragedy after tragedy heaped on her before she finally snaps and seeks revenge.

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Revenge Week: The Dubious Revenge of To Sir, with Love (2006)

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

This piece comes courtesy of Natasha Harmer, a member of the brilliant Coventry University East Asian Film Society (CUEAFS).

Is a classroom accusation of soiled underpants really a good reason to exact brutal revenge on your classmates and teacher sixteen years later? Well according to Im Dae-woong’s directorial debut To Sir, with Love (aka Bloody Reunion), it is.

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Revenge Week: Seeing Devils - Violence and Revenge in Kim Jee-woon’s I Saw the Devil (Part II)

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

By David Bell

Released the same year, Jang’s Bedevilled offers a more delicate approach. Hae-won, an unsympathetic Seoul bank-worker, is forced to take time off after aggressive behaviour towards a colleague and visits her childhood friend Bok-nam on the fictional island of Moo-do. Appalled by the mannerisms and cleanliness of the farming islanders, she passively bears witness to their horrific treatment of Bok-nam and murder, and denial thereof to (again) useless police, of Bok-nam’s daughter. Frustratingly, Jang persistently plays with our expectation to see Hae-won emerge from her clean middle-class apathy and intervene in Bok-nam’s suffering under the abject, conventionally Othered, islanders. But just as she previously failed to act after witnessing Bok-nam’s gang rape as a teenager by those same men as youths, Hae-won, indifferent, arranges her return to Seoul. In turn, Bok-nam’s manic massacre of the islanders takes on a decidedly, and cleverly achieved, tone of despair. Had Hae-won intervened, as her need for redemption combined with the wretched islanders’ need of punishment appeared to signpost she would, the ensuing carnage might have taken a more traditionally cathartic mode – one more in keeping with the violence performed in I Saw the Devil.

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Revenge Week: Don't Cry Mommy - A Necessary Lesson Poorly Delivered

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

It’s a funny thing to think you understand something and then experience it first hand, only to realize how naïve you’ve been about the subject. Truth be told, that’s happened to me a few times since arriving in Korea. Having lived in so many places before and being well versed in Korean cinema, my hubris and I felt quite comfortable in our knowledge of a country we’d never been to. My ego has taken a few digs since then but far more devastating has been my steep learning curve regarding social issues.

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Revenge Week: Fatal Femininity, Masochistic Masculinity - The Films of Kim Ki-young

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013).

“If the national cinema aesthetics of Korea are characterized by the thematic motifs of han (pent-up grief), mise-en-scenes of rural mountainous landscapes, and understated emotions that are frequently projected in the works of Shin Sang-ok and Im Kwon-Taek, Kim Ki-yong is a filmmaker who falls completely outside this framework.”

-       Kyung Hyun Kim

Words like baroque, surrealistic, erotic and horror get bandied around a lot when talking about Kim Ki-young. Though his status as an auteur and place in the Korean cinema pantheon is secure there remains a lot to be discussed about his films. Within the realm of the revenge narrative his films are unique creations tapping into our fears about family and the cultural upheavals caused by modernity. Returning to the same themes, character archetypes, storylines and images, Kim was obsessed with placing impotent men, bratty children, scorned women and matriarchs under one roof and seeing the weak and the strong clash with one another. Although not as violent as a lot of the current Korean revenge, crime and horror pictures they are nonetheless emotionally jarring and claustrophobic.

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Revenge Week: Trailers of Revenge! Day 2

Part of MKC's Revenge Week (July 8-14, 2013). This daily series comes courtesy of Tom Giammarco, the author of the Seen in Jeonju website, surely one of the best resources for information on classic Korean cinema on the web. Enjoy!

Over the past couple of days, I have been browsing through a huge number of revenge movies and I was left with two observations. The first is that I really needed to make a working definition of what a revenge movie is to better weed through the literally hundreds of possibilities I was looking at. The second observation was that it seemed to me that the majority of films, with the major exception of the imitation Hong Kong kung fu films, the person seeking revenge was, more often than not, a woman... at least in revenge films made before the year 2000.

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